I just binge-watched 14 episodes of Korean drama a day before yesterday. The next day I slept pretty much all day. Today I’m going to say something about what I thought.
It’s about a male anchor/reporter who suddenly discovered he had breast cancer. Of course there’s a love story, but my point isn’t really the ‘love’ part, but more of this line his mother said that bothered me a bit when she discovered he was sick. I can’t really directly quote it but it said something along the lines of, “Live your life! Enjoy your life and do what you want!”
It bothered me because most of us don’t even live the lives we want when we’re not sick. We just do what we gotta do. Yet when something big like this happens, when we have something we can’t backtrack on– the mindset that life is fucking short, that we’re gonna die because we have a time limit– only then hits us. We realize we’re only here for a borrowed amount of time, so we run as fast as we can to catch up to do things we didn’t do and actually start making life meaningful and enjoyable. We get scared that the regrets that we’ve been placing in the back of our minds will resurface in our last few minutes.
Life is short. Everyone knows that. All the books, movies and stories you hear from people will keep telling you that until your brain bursts. But the thing is: Nobody knows how short or long it will be. So we start forgetting that life is short because there’s no relative measurement of how short your lifespan can be. Yes, compute it all the probabilities you want from the health, political and economic prospects; but there’s always this mysterious variable that’s called chance. It’s like the lucky or unlucky lottery of life: being in a specific time at a specific place that may or may not be the wrong time and place for that last unfortunate accident of your life.
Do I really want to only start living my life once I have some incurable disease, where death is official and there’s already a predictive X marked on my calendar? Wouldn’t it be like trying to pay of debts of regret I couldn’t pay back when I was splurging on credits of time that didn’t even belong to me, but was actually on loan? When we’re dead and gone, all the money and currency in the world won’t be ours anymore, because someone will inherit them. Then again, if you’re rich enough and know how to manage time, it wouldn’t feel like all you did your whole life was work. The money would actually give you more time, because of instead of you doing it yourself, someone will do it, and make work faster.
If you died tomorrow, if not later, would you have any regrets? Don’t think about the achievements of how you could have changed the world. Don’t think about the future, but of the present and the past. Think about how contented you would be, dying while doing that thing you were doing at that time. The relationships you couldn’t save, would you have made much more of an effort to repair them if only you had more time? The job you might hate, would you have applied to another one or tried something else if only you had more time?
Don’t give the excuse if only you had more time, because there is never enough time. We’ll never have enough time to do everything we want to do (unless immortality). And if you actually end up doing everything, you might miss out on the things you need and not just want to do. We can only be happy if we’re prepared of what we’re going to lose, in terms of prioritizing the life goals.
To note the end of this and asking myself the same questions: I might regret not going out more to go to those events I keep track of but never actually attend to. The relationships I have…are messy, and not something I can fix on my own. Other than that, I’ve already written down my feelings for those relationships in a separate notebook. Maybe some curious cat will end up reading it one day and I’ll be more understood. No regrets on that one. The relationships that I had more courage to face…I tried my best, and everyday I’m still trying to face the damn demons of mine.
The things I wasn’t able to officially try (experience-wise): I might also regret that a tad bit. But if I’m going to die young, I probably won’t despair much about that because it’s just really not the appropriate time. As if it just wasn’t meant to be.
If I was going to die watching a movie I probably wouldn’t regret it. I won’t regret anything (as much as I can), because once you regret it means all those times you spent on it would be a waste. Once you treat it like trash—that’s all it will ever be: trash. You won’t even be able to recycle it or even just use it as fertilizer.
I don’t like wasting anything.
Yes, I am 